Defining the Specific Company Strategy

Once they have established their overriding innovation goal, chemical companies need to work out a strategy tailored to their more specific aims and requirements. The starting point should be a diagnosis of the company s core business to identify its overall competitive position, current growth prospects, and investors growth 

While investor expectations wiU dehneate the size of the playing field, benchmarking against competitors wiU give the company more precise information about its strengths and weaknesses in irmovation. Specifically, it should compare itself with its peers along the following dimensions  

Successful commercialization of innovations. Good indicators here are the number and sales of innovations achieved over the last few years and their share of total sales. Innovative companies find that recently launched products generate major revenues compared with the rest of their portfolios. 

Type of innovations. As outlined above, strong innovators focus on transformational and substantial innovations. However, some companies may find that they are pursuing high-impact innovation without commercial success, which wiU alert them to the fact that there is a block to be sought elsewhere in the organization. 

In addition, they need to consider the area for innovation here whether they are strong in in-house R D, for example, or whether they have major strengths or gaps in other areas of opportunity such as effectiveness in services or other non-traditional parts of the value chain, or in the new technologies. Providing services, especially in the application of chemicals, is a strength that has become an increasingly important source of innovation for chemical companies (see Chapter 3). 

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